Graphics time bomb.
Not to overdramaticize, but that’s the first thing that came to mind when I noticed an increasingly-annoying number of problems with my first-gen MacBook Pro w/ATI Radeon X1600. Single lines of miscolored pixels would appear in a Firefox window, and I’d drag the window around, only to have the pixels follow. Or I’d start QuickTime to play a movie, and midway in, a mostly green line would appear on the screen, flashing on and off annoyingly. Pausing the movie for awhile then pressing play again tended to solve it temporarily, but it was still annoying. Even weirder still were the cyan gradients that appeared on various UI elements. But worst of all was the screen flickering, then eventual crashes.
Detective work
Apparently, it’s a heating issue. I first thought this was a problem with my external display, then later shifted suspicion to the GPU. Yesterday, I searched and found this VERY LONG thread on the Apple Forums. I have the exact same issues as what’s described within, it’s uncanny. While it lends itself well to "Aha!" moments, these glitches are a tough problem to describe in words alone, so I’m thankful other posters uploaded screenshots. Thanks to "macuser128" for these; he’s been very persistent about getting the word out and I laud him:
Apple’s Article TS2377 makes note of what sounds like a vaguely similar issue but with very different hardware, the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. I wish the article included screenshots to communicate better.
I haven’t seen an official announcement from Apple about this, but that may be because this affects older hardware, so it isn’t as controversy-worthy as self-immolating new Mac minis (sad, sad humans). That doesn’t change the fact that with an increasing number of people "waking up" to this problem and reporting it, the info should be easier to find. I’m hoping if you have the same problem but didn’t know what the heck it was yet found my blog post through a search, that you’re now in a better position to get help.
What am I doing about it?
I’m trying smcFanControl to keep things cool as some have prescribed, but longer-term, I still have some months of AppleCare coverage and am prolly going to take my baby down to the Apple Store to get the logic board replaced as others have done. My heart goes out to those who don’t have AppleCare and are understandably frustrated about the cost of repairs. I encourage you to let Apple know what you think about this defect. This ain’t fun, but please keep it useful. Be firm that you wish to enjoy your machine longer, and would appreciate their assistance as the makers in doing so.
It’s such a discomforting phenomenon when you buy a product, it holds up well for the first year and then some, but afterwards, flaws — not just normal wear and tear — start to appear after the default warranty expires. This isn’t the most long-range example yet; many moons ago, I had a Sony TV that failed one day. I would’ve thought "It was just getting old…" were it not for a repairman who knew that this particular model failed in droves at the 7-year mark due to a burned-out tube.
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Hi all, I also got a Macbook pro 1.1 with the exact same problem, now under SL since few days, the problem seems ot appear even more than under Leopard, very weird. I would like to know if there is any news on the side of Apple support about a possible exchange program or for them to admit that there is serious problems due to this borign X1600.
In order to still use your computer, one of the thing you can do is remove the ATIRadeon Drivers.
What I did is to save it on my external Hard Drive in order to be able to replace it later.
The GPU is simply desactivate and all the job is done by the Dual Core.
Of course it is not so good as expected and HD movies lag to much but at least you can use your computer and wait for Apple and AMD to find something and change it for free.
Here is the list of the file to delete :
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX1000.kext
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX1000GA.plugin
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX1000GLDriver.bundle
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX1000VADriver.bundle
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX2000.kext
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX2000GA.plugin
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX2000GLDriver.bundle
– /System/Library/Extensions/ATIRadeonX2000VADriver.bundle
Good luck
I just realised how much I was lucky to have my NVidia card changed for free.
To precise that I did the modification given by Natim, and since now, no more display bug, I’ll try to see if when the laptop go higher in temperature there is still noting.
The bundles given by Natim are the paths for Snow Leopard, you can find them by doing a search in a terminal
sudo find / -iname “*radeon*”
I’ve created a question on Superuser website to know if someone found other tips or to gather people or tell others in the same case that they are not alone.
http://superuser.com/questions/73518/ati-x1600-driver-problem-on-mac
Hi,
I’m French, so excuse my very poor english…
I have the same problem with a macbook pro 2.16 GHz w ATI 1600 on leopard and SL. MBP freeze after displaying pixel’s lines. Does the solution exposed on your post solve the problem with leopard ?
Thanks for your answers
SD
Hi,
Your english is good
Je sais de quoi je parle hein 
Yes the solution I found works, but the problem is that you’ll loose 3d acceleration support and even when you’ll use the expose function to show all the windows, the movement will be very horrible, not smooth at all.
So for now I’m running ubuntu and with the 3d open source driver it’s working fine, with a normal use (whereas in Mac OSX even in normal use I had freeze/bugs)
I also sent an email to apple but no answer yet…
Thanks for your very quick answuer. I will try to delete ATI’s driver. Is it the same way to do with leopard than SL (like you describe ?)
Your french is good, i supposed you’re in france, because it’s very early, now in USA ?
By
That’s the same way I think, I didn’t try under Leopard, but if you use the command find, you’ll locate them.
Maybe also have a look at this post http://torley.com/macbook-pro-with-ati-radeon-x1600-distorted-video-glitches/comment-page-1#comment-55273
This user seems to be able to still play movies but on OSX I was unable to play a simple divx smoothly…
@ducout: non non je suis juste francais et en Chine
J’espere que tu pourras solutionner le probleme avec un OSX qui tourne pas au ralentit et sans freeze.
Thanks for your blog. I, too, have been getting the horizontal-line distortion in Firefox (as seen in Fig. 3 above). Same computer — MacBook Pro 2GHz, 2Ghz RAM with ATI Radeon X1600. Purchased mid-July 2006. Problem only became apparent in the past week. AppleCare expired and there is no indication from Apple that they’ll extend the warranty due to a defect in the chipset. This is an *expensive* replacement, running around $900, I believe. If I get any more crashes (which have begun to happen), I’ll have to opt for trashing the drivers. Wish Apple would pay attention to this issue.
In order to let Apple know, Thank you to vote for the problem and leave a comment to indicate that you have the same here :
http://superuser.com/questions/73518/ati-x1600-driver-problem-on-mac
last saturday i’ve tried to change thermal paste on the GPU and CPU. I’ve seen that Apple Thermal paste was crunchy and solid. I’ve change for new artic silver 5 paste. But there is still horizontal line as soon as the temperature of GPU is over 60°C. But no more freeze…
With fan control, i’m able to keep GPU”temperature under 50°C but with high speed of fan and a very noisy using. In this case, no line and no freeze, even with high load like flash player on youtube for example.
Thanks for the info!
Before going to the last-resort option of entirely disabling the Graphics card (as shown here [3]), I instead tried to lower the temps that the GPU get to – this has appeared to work very well!
The permanent solution (for me) was using the free & Excellent “Fan Control” SysPref – simply increase the “Base Speed” (for me, from 1500rpm to 2000rpm) and I also reduce the “Upper Threshold” to 70°C – thus the fans will work harder to keep temps down should they rise.
I coupled that with “iStat Menus” (I think it’s ShareWare) to monitor CPU & GPU temp (obviously GPU is more important here).
Dace appears to have the right numbers – as long as my GPU temps is around or below 48°, no line glitches, and no freezes!
I like this solution because, in theory, it will always makes sure the temp stays below the crash-point (with tweaking of the fan-rpm vs. CPU-Temp settings). I suppose One can assume that CPU temp and GPU temp are correlated – they are in the same aluminum box!
At 2000rpm, the fans are still barely audible (at least in my office with 3 PC’s running their loud fans). If I ever see the temp rise too much, I’ll simply increase the fan-speed/cpu-temp slope again. I’d rather a loud usable computer than a quiet dead one!
Thanks to everyone who posted their thoughts, it was very helpful in tracking down this elusive problem!
Screenshots here:
[Fan Control & iStat Menu monitoring][1]
[iStat Menu Setup][2]
[1]: http://www.ocpn.ece.ucsb.edu/index.php/publications/category/51-demis?download=956%3Afan-control-a-istat-menus-cpu-gpu-temp
[2]: http://www.ocpn.ece.ucsb.edu/index.php/publications/category/51-demis?download=957%3Aistat-menus-cpu-a-gpu-setup
[3]: http://superuser.com/questions/73518/ati-x1600-driver-problem-on-mac
Oh, system is:
MacBook Pro 1×2.16GHz Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, OS X 10.5.8, ATI Radeon X1600 (256MB), Dual-monitor (probably increases the GPU temp)
Also, clarification for anyone who needs it:
The way to use “Fan Control” is to basically make the slope of the graph steeper.
Also, look at the crosshair, and make sure that whatever you adjust makes it go UP (higher fan speed) – I found myself sometimes accidentally lowering the fan speed while making the slope steeper.
Update:
My computer used to freeze once a day.
This has NOT happened again since I implemented the fixes mentioned above (11 days ago)! I am quite happy with the Fan Control SysPref – it is really good.
Hi, I have the same 1st-gen 2.16 ghz Macbook Pro with the ATI X1600 graphics card. However, I don’t have any of the problems in those above. Mine is more similar to this one affecting the current 17-inch unibody Macbook Pro’s, http://www.pcworld.com/article/161993/apple_offers_firmware_fix_for_macbook_pro_vertical_line_problem.html . I got smcFanControl to raise the idle fans from 1000rpm to 2000rpm. I’ll have to wait and see if I will see the green lines again. I do notice similar graphics problems with some of the Macs at my school, but of course I don’t have administrator privilages to try out fan control on those.
After trying out the smcFanControl, it seems to lower my computer temperature by maybe 10~20 degrees Celsius, but it still doesn’t help the vertical line problem :-/.
mine were horizontal lines, like those shown in the pics above. I also saw the SysPrefs fading-blue thing (as shown above). I never saw the white-wiped Safari though.
Just a thought: perhaps your “vertical line” problem is something else? Check to see what your GPU temp is – is it always above 55°C? If not, maybe they’re not heating too much.
I too experienced the heat problems with my MacBook pro with the x1600. I am convinced that the graphic issues on my machine are directly related to the temperature of the GPU. Once the temperature gets above 60c my system starts to exhibit graphics glitches (tearing striping etc…).
- I have been using smcfancontrol for years, which does help significantly, but does not help when I get both cores running full blast for more than 5 minutes in a row.
- I have carefully cleaned out the old thermal compound and applied arctic silver, which only reduced the temperatures by about 1-2 degrees celsius. When you do this procedure I made the easily correctable mistake of not tightening the heatsink screws tight enough at first, which amplified the temperature problem
*** – the real solution to this problem for me was to vacuum the rear vent with a powerful (2000W) vacuum cleaner. I spent several minutes pressing the wand of the vacuum tightly against the crack and moving it back and forth where the screen meets the main body of the notebook. I went to the trouble of vacuuming the croissant crumbs out of the keyboard at the same time
. You will know when you get to the right spots because the smcfancontrol display will show your fans revving up to 7500rpm when the vacuum is over each fan exhaust port. This cleaning procedure shaved at least 15 degrees off of my temperatures.
My computer used to run at 58c at idle, and now it sits at 40c. It used to peak (and often lockup) at 75c, now I am hard pressed to get it above 60c. I am considering holding on to this ancient relic for even longer, even though I had previously scheduled replacement this spring.
I don’t have this problem with lines all over my screen, but since I am working on some full window video projects in Flash, I noticed that the videos drop a lot of frames and the video lags like a mf. It’s not normal for a dual core 2,16 GHz system with 2 GB of memory to play 720p video (like on my website http://www.inglorie.nl) with these problems.
I have replaced my hard drive a year ago or so for a bigger 500 GB. When I opened my Macbook, I also cleaned the fans. (@ tajh) It’s pretty easy to do so because the fans are using magnets in stead of bearings. Check a tutorial before you do so and buy a proper TORX screwdriver.
I am very curious about updates on the X1600 driver! We’ll see.
I have the same machine (2.16 ghz/15″/radeon 1600) have been fighting this video issue for 3 months. Deleted drivers, it now boots (before only in safe mode) Video is affected, but at this point it is better. I still have a square around my cursor with even horizontal lines. Thanks for the driver suggestion. I will be interested to see if there is any further start up issues.
Never had this problem before upgrading to Snow Leopard. Now I get ugly distortions in images both in iPhoto and Aperture. I have an iMac 5.1, Intel C2D 2,16MHz, and a ATI X1600 graphics card.
@Stefan Alsenmyr
Were you running Tiger or Leopard before upgrading to Snow Leopard?
I was running Leopard!
This issue started appearing for me a couple years back shortly after an upgrade from Tiger to Leopard. I tried uninstalling Leopard and going back to Tiger but had the same issue. Many others have noticed this correlation also.
Hey,
so happy to have found this website, as APPLE website has nothing to help us out.
Like STEFAN I’ve an iMac, white, half 2006…same problems, from Tiger to Leopard.
I’ll try with fan control, and finally by erasing drivers. I live in a warm country, Valencia SPAIN, and for sure it’s going to be hot!!!
…so bad we can’t be proud of a undefeatable MAC vs Windows, anymore. Apple should wake up and find a solution, our voice must be heard…what else can we do???
so Natim I tried your method of removing the 8 drives and it’s given me some problems. once the drives were removed I couldn’t play any video with any program (vlc, quicktime, etc) the program would crash. so then i tried to put back the drivers and i got an error:
“System extension cannot be used. The system extension “/system/library/extensions/ATIRadeonX100.kext” was installed improperly and cannot be used. please try reinstalling it, or contact the product’s vendor for an update.”
I tried reinstalling it, no luck. Any suggestions?
Thanks
I tried removing the drivers and it fixed everything (video plays poorly though). The only way to get the drivers back (which makes my computer crash consistently every time), is to do a fresh os x install from the disc.
I only have horizontal garbage but same thing
MBP 15\ 2.16 Duo – Upgraded from Tiger to Snow Leopard – Never had a problem until Snow Leopard.
Update – My MBP got progressively worse until it reached a point where it wouldn’t last a minute after booting up before freezing. I took it to the Apple store recently and they told me that it was a problem with the graphics chipset (surprise, surprise). I did not have Apple Care and the machine was out of warranty, so replacing the logic board set me back around $300 and took about a week. The problems have not returned since the replacement.
I am so frustrated with this right now. I foolishly had applecare and did not use it, it ran out back in november, and now i am having this problem EXACTLY as all of you have described it. I am taking it to the apple store tomorrow (appt w/ a genius), but I can not get any work done on this thing. I posted a note in the “suggestions” for the macbook pro, and I hope someone reads it. There may have been a slight problem before
“upgrading” to snow leopard, but the upgrade definitely aggravated the situation.
The most daring thing I tried to solve this issue on my iMac was to install the the modified version of smcFanControl. It did however have no “messiah” effect
. I get slightly noisier iMac but what the hell, it runs at least slightly cooler and thats never wrong…
Lets hope for 10.6.4…
Well, I switched to Linux Mint full-time and the problem seems to have gone away. It comes back whenever I use Mac or Windows XP too long. So this is either a driver problem or the Linux driver doesn’t tax the graphics card hard enough to produce this problem.
Same, it goes away when I use any Linux distro or remove the ATI drivers from Mac OS. Looks like a driver issue.
More information on same issue with iMacs–>
http://getsatisfaction.com/apple/topics/2006_imac_graphics_card_crash_freeze
Thank you for the information. Deleting the ATRadeon files and the GEForce files got me to a point I could boot into regular mode. The screen was still pixelated though. Through trial and error I discovered that unplugging the power cord and booting from battery restored the screen to normal. I then created a new admin account and deleted the old which seems to have fixed problem. Apple assured me the video card was fried (X1600), they seem to use the term “genius” very liberally!
macbook pro 15″, 10.6.4
Got the same problem with my 15″ 2,2 Duo MBP and this damn ati gpu..
anyway i can just recommend you all the tip of tajh, it helped me bust of about 10 – 15°C!!
ive never head my mbp so quiet for the past 3 years. just vacuum the slots underneath the display from the front and the back and do it for some minutes and you will see that the temperature declines.
this is of course no solution for ever, but it helps cool down your system. now i go and checkout if i still got some warranty left.. hate those late systemf*ckups
if this really is a software driver problem, then apple would have its use to not solve the problem even if they know about it – brings in a lot of money when people by new hardware or let old ones replace… really sad that a “high” quality product gets hardware problems like this.
Yeah, besides using Linux Mint full time, I’ve also been running Windows XP a lot recently, and I haven’t seen the weird lines appear, yet. I’m thinking maybe I should switch back to Mac for a while and see if the lines appear again. My Mac runs far hotter in Windows than under Linux or Mac, so I suspect it’s not entirely a hardware issue.
Wanted to report on this issue myself. I just got my MacBookPro back after paying $310 for a full logic board swap-out. My issue had steadily declined over nine months from a lock-up-or-two-a-day to being hard-pressed to not have horizontal line glitches in Finder windows and the desktop!
While I expected that an out-of-warranty MBP would cost $1000 or so for a logic board swap, Apple has a fairly unique “Flat Rate repair” option that covers whatever repairs are needed at a blanket cost of $210 + $100 labor. While I do believe that a “design flaw” should be fixed gratis, $310 is actually fairly cheap if I get 5 more years out of this 4-year-old laptop.
One thing to note: this coverage option apparently expires at five years from the purchase date, as a five year old Mac is considered “legacy” and Apple can no longer guarantee they’ll have the parts for repair/replacement. So if you’re considering getting the logic board (graphics card) replaced, do it in the next year. I got the whole logic board replaced for the “flat rate”; simply had to show the glitch at the Genius Bar and they quoted me the $310 option.
I will also say, however, that the whole vacuuming the fans/vents on the back of the MBP almost kept me from doing the repair. The last week was so terrible (as I was backing up my data before sending it in for repairs) that I revisited this site and read about the vacuuming trick. I did the vacuum and suddenly I couldn’t recreate my problem at all! Where before all I had to do was play two QuickTime movies at once to get horizontal lines all over the place and a lock-up within a minute or two, suddenly I could run 12-15 degrees hotter and had to run that way continuously for 15 minutes or so before I could detect a glimpse of the stray horizontal line. I have no idea what it would have taken to actually lock up the machine, and I weighed just living with the issue again instead of getting it replaced.
So…. dust inside the machine is definitely compounding the flaw. A thorough vacuum of the back ports *could* well restore or at least further mitigate any glitch/lock-up problems. But because it was likely just a matter of time (and it *did* still have the issue, even if it was less bad), and because I’ll likely get another 4-5 years before this new graphics card/logic board starts showing the same behavior (assuming it will), I kinda think $310 was a reasonable solution for getting back to no problems at all. Sure, it’s $310 I shouldn’t have had to spend, but it’s still better than $1K.
I must admit it is really nice to run the machine hot and without cooling pads and fans and all the hoops I was jumping through before — without a single stray line or freeze. It’s nice to have my Mac back.
Best of luck to you all.
Yes, we just submitted a MacBook Pro for a “Depot Repair” or “flat rate repair”. They fixed it 100%, even replaced part of the external case since it had a slight ding and this covers everything you submit that needs fixed.
We also think that it’s unfortunate that someone has to pay any amount to repair something that truly is a manufacturer defect (ATI’s graphic card), and after suffering years of issues from the beginning, but at least this is an option that Apple offers and it will keep you from having to ditch the whole thing.
It looks like this MacBook Pro may live like new for a while longer, but we really think keeping a computer longer than 3 years is where you start to see significant performance and new technology limitations. It is a great for surfing the web and checking your email… and as long as new versions of Mac OS X support it, we’ll probably keep it around.
So, after a long time of helping others with their sick MacBook Pro’s ATI, as well as dealing with one of our own, we consider this resolved and will be satisfied that Apple did have an acceptable option even though it was not covered for free. We will be hesitant and are not big fans of ATI GPUs… heck, NVIDIA had problems of their own that they initially denied, but at least it was addressed and Apple offered extended repair coverage….
For those of you that pulled out the drivers from the system and want to try putting them back, but have file permission problems:
There is a program called Extensions-Repair in this archive: http://rapidshare.com/files/101604961/dionysos_ati1600_71c2.zip.html
Put the drivers back, run Extensions-Repair and reboot.
i’m taking mine if for the logic board replacement today. I really wish apple would pay for this.
Hi,
similar problems (I think) but ours went to the point that we get the blue screen freeze on boot and can only boot in safe mode (blue screen freeze for CD or external boot, too)
does that mean that removing the drivers is my only hope of using the computer without doing the $310 fix? I can’t play with the fan speeds and or vacuum at this point, right? Because it’s not getting worse over time, it can only safe boot on any and all attempts.
For that matter, will removing the drivers even work for me?
Thanks.
@Lance – it can’t hurt to vacuum it out. It might give you enough breathing room to install the fan speed app.
My guess is that the problem gets exponentially worse, probably due to the thermal compound breaking down over time and high temps. The higher the temperatures, the worse it gets, the worse it gets, the higher the temperatures…
I’ve seen mine get worse and worse over time. It’s not my main computer so it’s not been a primary concern, but now it won’t tolerate even moderate activity without the GPU crashing – at least I presume that’s what’s happening as the machine still seems to be running. It’s long out of warranty so I’ll try cracking it open to see what’s happening inside.
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